director Uwe Boll’s Alone
in the Dark, in a slightly redacted reworking of my original theatrical review. You will desperately need, in
my estimation, the following items for survival:

• One or more friends with barbed wit and a proclivity for
  awful genre tripe

• Cash for anonymous purchase, plus hats and/or sunglasses to disguise identity (you won’t want to have this rental credited to your account)

• A considerable amount of alcohol

• Kleenex to wipe away tears of laughter

• The gene blocking the impulse of shame

From frame one, Alone in the Dark announces itself as awful with such a manic, drunken
fervor that you have to on some level
step back and tip your hat in awe to its audacity. Helmed by Boll (Blackwoods,
The House of the Dead), there is no
subtext in Alone in the Dark, only
capital-T text — writ large, bold and obvious. Every line, every moment seethes
with a brazen stupidness, from the nonsensically edited action and on-screen
flubs (I’ll give them a stay of execution on the spelling of “analysing,”
though I don’t think this is a British production and it doesn’t jibe with the
American characters) to the body armor apparently picked up at a Starship Troopers 2 yard sale and the
riotously appalling dialogue (one suggested drinking game: a swig for every
time a character says, “The readings are off the charts!”). The film is a
masterwork of awfulness, a literal and veritable bad movie blueprint, from
start (which features a comically long narrated preamble) to merciful conclusion.

The plot, as it were, details a bunch of folks as they try
to rustle up the last of a few artifacts relating to the ancient Abkani tribe.
Of course, a shampoo-needing knucklehead at the beginning of the film has
opened a precious golden arc, meaning… aw, crap, who really knows or cares?
There’s monsters. And zombie-esque human marauders. On the other side,
Christian Slater squints and shoots as Edward Carnby, a paranormal investigator
and erstwhile orphan who used to run with a shadowy government organization
known as 713, but now wears a swashbuckling leather duster and plays by his own
rules. That leaves Stephen Dorff’s equally stubbled and glowering Burke
Richards in charge of the 713 posse; along to fulfill the cleavage quota is
Aline Cedrac (Tara Reid). Pow! Bam! Zing!

Adapted from an Atari videogame by two debut screenwriters
and the writer of MVP2: Most Vertical
Primate, Alone in the Dark makes
many choices, every single one of them poor, but chief amongst the blunders is
trying to sell us a bespectacled Reid as a brilliant anthropologist. She is the
most utterly lost of a cast that phones in every crappy line with an
automaton-like indifference. They say that even ugly babies have faces their
mothers love, but this is truly a film that not even hardcore, braindead genre fans could
appreciate in straightforward fashion. As a slice of camp comedy, on the other hand…